The Internet provides a vast amount of information. The information is stored at many different sites, such as on computers and servers, in databases, etc., around the world. These different sites are communicatively linked to the Internet through various network infrastructures. Any person may access the publicly available information via a suitable network device connected to the Internet.
Due to the sheer amount of information available on the Internet, it is impractical as well as impossible for a person, e.g., a network user, to manually search throughout the Internet for specific pieces of information. Instead, most people rely on different types of computer-implemented tools to help them locate the desired information. One of the most commonly and widely used tools is a search engine, such as the search engines provided by Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. To search for information relating to a specific subject matter on the Internet, a person typically provides a short phrase describing the subject matter, often referred to as a “search query”, to a search engine. The search engine conducts a search based on the query phrase using various search algorithms and generates a search result that identifies network contents that are most likely to be related to the search query. The network contents are presented to the person, often in the form of a list of links, each link being associated with a different web page that contains some of the identified network contents. The person is then able to click on the links to view the specific network contents contained in the corresponding web pages as he wishes.
There are continuous efforts to improve the qualities of the search results generated by the search engines. Accuracy, completeness, presentation order, and speed are but a few of the performance aspects of the search engines for improvement.